Fleet operators are increasingly interested in transitioning to electric vehicles. This move to electric transport brings the requirement to manage the power supply to the locations where the electric vehicles operate. Smart Electric Urban Logistics provides an innovative set of solutions which will support this change and make a vital contribution to cutting emissions in Central London. It will also provide a scalable set of outputs which other logistics operators can implement to improve their vehicle fleets and the environment.
What is the project about?
This project aims to design and develop a tool, or set of tools, that allow an assessment of applications of new demand connection to our network to be done quickly and effectively, taking into account the demand profile of the customer submitting the application.
This will allow customers such as large electric vehicle fleet operators, who can demonstrate predictable power demands, to connect to the network more quickly and at lower cost using more flexible offerings such as timed connections.
How we’re doing it
The software we develop will undertake four main steps in order to assess the connection requirements of a new charging facility:
Data mining – retrieving the historic data from our records
Data cleansing – ensuring that anomalies in the data are identified and corrected
Data preparation – preparing the data that will be used for the network analysis step that follows (i.e. right data in the right format)
Data analysis – running the data through power flow analysis software to understand the network reinforcement impact
What makes it innovative
Cheaper and faster connections for customers with large electric vehicle fleets and high power demand.
What we’re learning
The power demand of the commercial electric vehicle fleet operators tends to be large and concentrated. The implications are;
Significant capacity required from network
Potential reinforcement can be required
It can take longer for new charging facilities to be deployed because of the work involved
The current conventional approach to meeting new customer load requirements is relatively risk averse.
The network is currently designed to meet peak demand at any time using a detailed study. Variations, such as troughs in demand and flexibility in customer demand, are not taken into account. As a result, the costs associated with connecting additional electric freight vehicle infrastructure to the network can make the electrification of freight vehicles commercially unviable.
To incorporate the peaks and troughs in demand into the analysis of a customer’s new power demands would make the exercise substantially more complicated, but could also lead to a significant increase in network efficiencies.
This project aims to design and develop such a tool, or set of tools, that allow this assessment to be done quickly and effectively.
Share your ideas
If you have an idea that could reshape or revolutionise the way we work, we want to hear from you.
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